Serde is a framework for serializing and deserializing Rust data
structures efficiently and generically.

The Serde ecosystem consists of data structures that know how to serialize
and deserialize themselves along with data formats that know how to
serialize and deserialize other things. Serde provides the layer by which
these two groups interact with each other, allowing any supported data
structure to be serialized and deserialized using any supported data format.

See the Serde website https://serde.rs/ for additional documentation and
usage examples.

Where many other languages rely on runtime reflection for serializing data,
Serde is instead built on Rust's powerful trait system. A data structure
that knows how to serialize and deserialize itself is one that implements
Serde's Serialize and Deserialize traits (or uses Serde's derive
attribute to automatically generate implementations at compile time). This
avoids any overhead of reflection or runtime type information. In fact in
many situations the interaction between data structure and data format can
be completely optimized away by the Rust compiler, leaving Serde
serialization to perform the same speed as a handwritten serializer for the
specific selection of data structure and data format.